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taking responsibility

Sometimes change can only come about when people take responsibility for problems, even when they didn’t necessarily cause the problem. Kay Pentecost tells a nice story about this in the XP group on Yahoo today, in which one group blames their problems on poor specifications received from another group.

When this happens, it seems to me to be another kind of local optimisation: someone tries to ensure that the problem lies at someone else’s door, and the result is that the overall process flow suffers. Both groups need to work together to improve communication, for the greater good…